My Ruby-Throated Hummingbird

I love suburban animals. I don’t mind the deer coming through a couple of times a year picking me clean. I don’t even shoo the occasional coyote. I’m even vaguely tolerant of the raccoon who shits on my roof on a regular basis. I’ve lost it a few times with the groundhog population. Years ago, when they started to chew on my farm porch stanchions and bathe in my well house, I had to eliminate a few. I used a single-shot .22 caliber rifle without a scope. I always fired a warning shot over their heads. These groundhogs, after all, were rural, untrained and lacking suburban survival skills.

In my present home, I just watch groundhogs and cheer them on as they get fat, knowing that fall is coming and they will take their heavy presence underground for the next five months. Groundhogs are not beautiful creatures. I’m just saying. Raccoons get the edge here. This morning, my wife had a first-light staring contest with a raccoon coming back from his midnight garbage run. No word on who blinked first. It’s hard to tell, as they have such cunning eyes.

Mainly, I bury birds who fly into one of our windows or just fall from the sky, no matter the precautions we have taken and still take. We seem to be on some ill-fated, migratory path. I have a bird burial plot in a flower bed not far from the house. I mourn all birds found in the parking lot: the robin, the blue jay, the common grackle, and the white-breasted nuthatch. I am particularly saddened to find a red-headed woodpecker, a species seen in abundance among the trees we have left unattended for their use. There’s a tree outside my office window that attracts the red-headed woodpecker or the red-bellied woodpecker on a regular basis. The drumming of the former on a dead tree limb is as predictable as my morning coffee. It is a surreal, almost metallic sound that seems vaguely foreign to the woods and that makes the woodpecker even more welcome.

A few days ago, I noticed slash of green among brown leaves near the garage door. It looked no more than 2–3-inches long. On closer examination. I realized this was a ruby-throated hummingbird, a female, with a green coat and a white throat. The whisper-thin beak seemed to be half the length of the body. I had read that this hummingbird feeds up to eight times an hour then slows her metabolism at night to such an extent feeding isn’t needed.

I rarely see a hummingbird on our property. They are easy to miss. The speed of their wings can make them almost invisible. We don’t have a feeder with sugar water, a key attraction for the bird. We don’t have flowers with tubular blossoms that are used to attract hummingbirds. Since a neighbor does have a hummingbird feeder, I assume this one just wandered off course.

Finding this hummingbird has really bothered me. Perhaps this is because she is so beautiful, so small, so energetic, and so efficient. Perhaps it is because even the smallest creature can bleed and show signs of trauma on a body slight enough to hold in the palm of a hand. Perhaps, I feel at fault.

I buried her among the last flowers of summer.